"The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
More Ayn Rand quotes
"When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any v...
"Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.
"Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to s...
"For the "We" must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within a man's soul, else it bec...
"Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You ...
"Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surren...
"If this is vise I want no virtue....I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happine...
"Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—n...
"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by...
"Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which al...
"To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned an...
"A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one act...
"A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to c...
"A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?